YASMIN ZADEH BALBUENA

LA CUEVA

Just as the sun and moon rise and set each day; our lives are a
constant ebb and flow between the light and dark sides of our souls.
All of us have aspects of light and aspects of dark. A face we show and
a face we hide. Wherever there is light, the shadow is present.

Imagine this: People live under the Earth in a cavelike dwelling. Stretching a long way up toward the daylight is its entrance, toward which the entire cave is gathered. The people have been in this dwelling since childhood, shackled by the legs and neck. Thus they stay in the same place so there is only one thing for them to look at: Whatever they encounter in front of their faces.
                     - Plato, The Republic 380BC

In his allegory of The Cave, Plato described human beings living their lives in an underground realm, its entrance open towards the light, only able to see the images projected in front of them in the form of shadows cast by the hard light of a fire blazing behind them. This allegory Plato described, is a camera obscura. Just as the painters of bygone eras would sit inside these enclosed dark spaces, tracing the image of what appeared outside a tiny window in the hard light of day, our minds are also eternally bound to the impressions we receive through our senses, creating imagined realities through the shadows cast before us.

To take photos is to capture the relationship between light and dark, to submit oneself to shadow-play. What began as a simple device created to study optics can also be viewed as a guiding metaphor for the soul.
Everything about the camera obscura process embodies the need to slow down and become more sensorially aware, questioning a modern world seemingly more fixated on artificiality than a connection to Nature. Its long exposure times and emphasis on tactility and intuition give way to a more sensuous, meditative style of image-making in which one become more grounded in the present moment and the magic surrounding the photographic process.

This series was taken using a self-constructed pinhole camera and depicts a journey into my unconscious beginning during the introspective year I spent after having left London’s streets and an unabated career path that was making me sick, to seek refuge amidst the forest trees of the Chilterns countryside. It was a time where I felt my photography needed to slow down alongside me, and the physical and ethereal aspects of the camera obscura process became a form of meditation and an integral part of my healing process.

Emotions exist for a reason, so we can achieve a better understanding of ourselves. But the rapidity of urban life forces us to push them into the unconscious, further into the shadows, where we ignore them and go on pretending to be what society wants us to be. Times will come in our lives when our consciousness, our light, will urge us to confront these shadows in order to embrace our own duality and find quietness where there was once disorder.

When we stop to take a photograph we are focused entirely on what it means to be in the here and now, without having to answer to what!s next. Every time I opened the shutter and closed my eyes I found I was able to ground myself and explore the relationship between internal and external worlds. One cannot understand the world if we don!t accept that everything that comes out of the psyche is a paradox, and the need to slow down and voyage inwards, into our dark subconscious to face our shadows so that we can discover our own truths, is perfectly embodied in this photographic process.

This project became a way for me to document my changing environments and self, to embrace the present moment and face my fears surrounding impermanence in order to find balance and calm an anxious mind. Pausing, reconnecting with the wild and exploring my connection to the earth became key to regaining my sense of balance as well as reassessing my relationship with the city and with my own self.